Part 2 (2/2)

A faint colour came into Mr. Loftus's pale face. He kept his eyes on the floor.

'I think,' he said gently, but with a touch of reserve in his voice which did not escape his companion, 'we must both forget that as completely as she herself has probably already forgotten it.'

'She has not forgotten it,' said Lady Pierpoint, ignoring, though with a pang, his evident wish to dismiss the subject. 'It is that which is causing her ill-health. She can think of nothing else. Some of us,' she said sadly, 'are so const.i.tuted that we can bear trouble and disappointment--others can't. This poor child, who has cried for the moon, is not mentally and physically strong enough to bear the disappointment of being denied it. And the doctors say that her life is dependent on her happiness.'

Mr. Loftus rose, and paced up and down the room. She dared not look at him.

Presently he stopped, and, with his face turned away, said with emotion:

'But the moon is a dreary place if it is seen as it is, with its extinct volcanoes and its ice-fields. Nothing lives there. The fire in it is burnt out, and there is snow over the ashes. It is only in the eyes of a child that the moon is bright. We elders know that it is dark and desolate.'

Lady Pierpoint was awed. She had known Mr. Loftus for twenty years. He had been kind to her in the early years of her widowhood, and in the later ones had helped on her boys by his influence in high quarters. She had often told him of her difficulties, but she had never till now heard him speak of himself.

Her great admiration for him, which was of a humbler kind than Sibyl's, led her to say: 'It is not only in the child's eyes that the moon is bright.'

She might have added with truth that in her own middle-aged eyes it was bright, too.

'I greatly honoured you when Sibyl told me about it,' she continued, after a long pause. 'It is because I have entire trust in you that I have told you the truth about this poor child, who is as dear to me as my own, though I hope my own will face life more bravely. Should you, after reflection, feel able to do her this--this--great kindness, I hope you will come and stay with us at Abergower for Whitsuntide. But--I shall not expect you, and I shall not mention to anyone that I have asked you.'

She rose and held out her hand. She looked tired.

He held it a moment, and she endeavoured to read the grave, inscrutable glance that met hers, but she could not.

'Thank you,' he said, and went away.

'How dare she think of him?' said Lady Pierpoint to herself.

CHAPTER III.

'L'amour est une source nave, partie de son lit de cresson, de fleurs, de gravier, qui, riviere, qui, fleuve, change de nature et d'aspect a chaque flot.'--DE BALZAC.

In England Spring is a poem. In the Highlands of Scotland she has the intensity of a pa.s.sion. The crags and steeps are possessed by her; they stand transfigured like a stern man in the eyes of his bride. And here in these solemn depths and lonely heights, as nowhere else, shy Spring abandons herself, secure in the fastnesses where her every freak is loved. She sets the broom ablaze among the gray rocks, yellow along the river's edge, yet hardly yellower than the leaves on the young oak just above. The larches hear her voice, and hundred by hundred peep over each other's heads upon the hillside, all a-tremble with fairy green. The shoots of the dwarf cherry, scattered wide upon the uplands, are pink among the gra.s.s. The primroses are everywhere, though it is Whitsuntide--behind the stones, among the broom, beside the little tumbling streams, in every crevice, and on every foothold. The mountain-ash holds its white blossoms aloft in its careful spreading fingers. Even the silver birch forgets its sadness while spring reigns in Scotland.

There are those to whom she speaks of love, but there are many more to whom she whispers, 'Be comforted.' When hope leaves us, it is well to go out into the woods and listen to what Spring has to say. Though life is gray, the primroses are coming up all the same, and the young shafts of the bluebell pierce the soft earth in spite of our heartache. A hedge-sparrow has built him a house in the nearest tangle of white hawthorn. There will be children's voices in it presently. Be comforted.

Hope is gone, but not lost. You shall meet her again in the faces of the children, G.o.d's other primroses. She is not lost. She has only taken her hand out of yours. Be comforted.

But Sibyl refused to be comforted. Her love for Mr. Loftus, if small things may be called by large names, was the first violent emotion of a feeble and impulsive mind in a feeble body, both swayed by veering influences, both shaken by the changing currents of early womanhood, as a silver birch is shaken with its leaves.

A woman with a deeper heart, and with a slight perception of Mr.

Loftus's character, would have reverently folded her devotion in her heart and have gone on her way enn.o.bled by it. But with Sibyl, to admire anything was to wish to possess it; to tire of anything was to cast it away.

Mr. Loftus was in her eyes without an equal in the world. Therefore--the reasoning from her point of view was conclusive--she must marry him. She had no knowledge, she had not even a glimpse, of the gulf of feeling, far wider than the gulf of years, which separated him from her. She imagined no one appreciated him, or entered into the dark places of his mind, as she did. She mistook his patient comprehension of her trivial aspirations, and his unfailing kindness to all young and crude ideas, for the perfect sympathy of two kindred souls, and was wont to speak mysteriously to Peggy of how minds that were really related drew each other out and enriched each other.

It is always a dangerous experiment to awaken a sleeping soul to the pageant of life. Mr. Loftus had endeavoured to do this for Sibyl, consciously, gently, with great care, out of the mixed admiration and pity with which she inspired him, in the hope that, in later years, when her feet would be swept from under her, she might find something to cling to, amid the wreck of happiness which his dispa.s.sionate gaze foresaw that she would one day achieve out of her life.

He had run the risk which all who would fain help others must be content to run--the risk that their work will be thrown away. He saw that the little rock-pool which reflected his own face was shallow, but he had not gauged the measure of its shallowness. His deep enthusiasms, tried and tempered before she was born, weary now with his own weariness, aroused hers as the Atlantic wave, sweeping up the rocks, just reaches and arouses the rock-pool, and sends a flight of ripples over it, which, if you look very close, break in mimic waves against the further edge.

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